Large companies with many servers and desktop computers on their networks have trouble in keeping accurate inventories of the assets they control. To fill that need, automated inventory systems have been developed that comprise software running on computers which are coupled to the network. The software determines which IP addresses on a company's networks are “active” meaning they are coupled to active devices. The software then logs onto any devices coupled to the active IP addresses and uses “fingerprints” to determine what kind of operating system the computing device is running. Such systems then log onto the operating systems and use other fingerprints to determine what operating system version the computer is running and which application programs are installed and what versions they are. This is done by looking at the files in the directory structure, the register entries and the list of active processes kept by the operating system. All this information when compared to the fingerprints tells a great deal about the software which is installed on a computer and the versions thereof.
The fingerprints can also be used to determine other things about the system such as the hardware configuration, number and capacity of disk drives, other hardware accessories installed, type of network card installed, etc. These types of information can be obtained from configuration files and drivers present on the system and stored on the hard drive.
As an example of the type of automatic inventory system used to do this type of inventory work, consider U.S. patent application Ser. No. 10/125,952, filed Apr. 18, 2002, entitled APPARATUS AND METHOD TO AUTOMATICALLY COLLECT DATA REGARDING ASSETS OF A BUSINESS ENTITY, published Oct. 23, 2003 as US-2003-0200294-A1, which is hereby incorporated by reference. The technology described in this publication will hereafter be referred to as BDNA or the BDNA automatic asset discovery process or system. It is described in detail herein below under the heading BDNA Automatic Asset Discovery Process.
To just determine which computers are installed on the networks of a client, these prior art automatic inventory systems such as that described in the above cited US patent application can rapidly find out such information once a range of IP addresses is given to the prior art system. However to determine which application software and operating systems and the versions thereof which are installed on each computer is more difficult and time consuming.
For this kind of inventory data to be collected, the automatic inventory system must log onto every computer on the network. The problem with this approach of logging onto all the computers on the network is twofold, first, it adds unnecessary traffic to the network; and, second, it requires that permission to access every computer on the network must be obtained from the appropriate network administrator. For example, there may be 65,000 Windows desktops in an organization. Some of them may be managed by one department and others may be managed by a different department or a outside vendor. In a company with thousands of computers on the network, possibly in different work groups or divisions and with different network administrators, this obtaining of permission can be time consuming and a hassle.
There are prior art inventory systems that do automatic inventory by logging onto computers on a network, but the applicants are aware of no prior art automatic inventory systems which gather information from backup systems.